Shadowbreaker

by Warhammer 40K

  Sigma bowed.

  Silence hung in the air for a moment.

  Omicron raised his hand. ‘You are about to ask after your sister, my friend. I’m pleased to say that, at last, I have some news on that front, though I ask that you do not take it for more than it is. Remain objective.’

  Sigma’s avatar leaned forward eagerly.

  So malleable, thought Omicron. Attachment truly is weakness.

  ‘The work at Facility fifty-two,’ he said, ‘has recently resulted in two new avenues to a potential cure. I have ordered that both avenues be fully explored. Work is underway. There is some cause to be optimistic.’

  ‘A cure,’ muttered Sigma to himself.

  ‘A potential cure, my friend,’ insisted Omicron. ‘The work is difficult and time-consuming. I will tell you more when I have it.’

  Sigma wasn’t hearing him. Already, he was envisioning a reunion with his beloved sister, the only soul who had ever cared for him in their childhood years. She had been asleep in cryo-stasis for decades, frozen in her youth in order to slow the progression of her mysterious disease.

  Omicron watched his underling. Sigma’s avatar was hooded as always, but the set of shoulders, the shifting of the hands, these things told him much.

  He had not lied to Sigma outright. There were new avenues of research which might yield a cure. But even were such a cure discovered, any application of it would have to be held off. There was far greater work to be done, and he needed Sigma’s undistracted commitment to it. While that commitment was secured on hope, his sister would remain in stasis, ever youthful while her brother passed decade after decade in service to Omicron’s ambitions.

  As for the Death Spectre, everything had happened just as Omicron had been told. Even the interfering eldar did not know they were simply another piece on the game board, that they too were being manipulated into position.

  Soon, Blackseed would be complete. Omicron alone would wield the power to save the Imperium from the tyranid menace. Lauded as a hero, he would quickly ascend to the primacy of the Ordo Xenos, then from there to that of the Inquisition itself. He would take his seat on the Adeptus Terra, and from there, with the aid of his strange benefactor, he would be but one step from his ultimate ambition.

  Absolute rule.

  He’d had visions of blinding clarity.

  He’d heard the whispers in the dark.

  As absolute ruler of mankind, he would save his species from the horror and destruction that was closing in on all sides.

  And if Al Rashaq were real – if it was indeed the only stable gateway through time that mankind had ever discovered – even better, for the seed of his ascendency could be planted in the past and bring his dreams and ambitions to life all the sooner.

  Messiah. Chosen. The new Emperor of Mankind.

  It was his destiny. His duty.

  He alone could do this thing. No other had the fortitude or the knowledge.

  That he was deep in the grip of a terrible madness did not occur to him even once.

  He dismissed Sigma, ending the meeting in the psychic mindscape. The room dissolved. Minds returned to bodies of bone and flesh aboard ships many stars apart.

  As Omicron left the shadowy, candle-lit chamber and its psychic choir, now silent, sleeping, he thought back to the day he had first heard the voice of the great herald, Hepaxammon.

  ‘You are the one,’ the herald had said, its tones filled with light and warmth and divine glory. ‘You are the saviour to be, and the God-Emperor Himself, beloved of all, has sent me to show you the way.’

  Epilogue

  Across all the worlds of mankind, there are perhaps a dozen species, mostly of the insectoid type, which are said to be capable of surviving a full nuclear apocalypse.

  Their names are spoken with a curious mix of disdain and respect, for they are always hideous, crawling, chittering things, but at the same time, men recognise and respect their incredible resilience.

  Their genes do not become corrupted. They do not erupt in tumours. Through sheer toughness, they weather what most other species cannot.

  They are true survivors.

  Tychonis had one such creature. The Kashtu people of the north called it shukri’sha, or rattleback. The Ishtu of the south called it mhur k’han, the deathless man. Sixty centimetres long, with ten legs and an almost unbreakable shell, this simple creature was always given great respect. To slay one was to bring ill fortune to one’s family for generations, for it was said that the God-Emperor took joy in all things that were strong and single-minded, and so he had created the resh’vah.

  But it was not a rattleback which crawled unseen from the irradiated ruins of Alel a Tarag, the Tower of the Forgotten, some seven nights after its thermonuclear destruction at the hands of Commander Coldwave.

  It was not a so-called deathless man, and it was not a mere sixty centimetres long.

  This survivor pushed itself from the rubble with four long arms each ending in diamond-hard black talons. Its tongue flicked out and tasted the air. It stretched to its full height, over two metres tall.

  Casting its bony head about, it searched its surroundings through pale violet eyes. Then, with a screech that cut through the night air, it loped off down the moonlit canyon in search of prey.

  Just seven years later, the infection rate among the combined t’au and human population of Tychonis was seventy-six per cent.

  A great psychic beacon pulsed from the planet.

  The hive-mind heard.

  The hive-mind responded.

  Two years later, Tychonis lay utterly still.

  Silent.

  Lifeless.

  Four years later, the entire subsector lay dead, scoured of all organic matter.

  All it had taken was the survival and escape of a single purestrain genestealer from the prison in the desert.

  Notes

  pog – from pogyo: a root vegetable, blue in colour, very cheap, highly nutritious and a staple food of the Tychonite human population. Used among Kashtu people as a derogatory term for the t’au.

  Melshala: Uhrzi term for the God-Emperor of Mankind, literally ‘father of all men’.

  Blue-tongues: slang term, highly offensive, for those humans who embrace the t’au philosophy, integrate into their society or otherwise seek favour with them.

  Resh’vah: literally ‘holiest of sons’.

  About the Author

  Originally hailing from the rain-swept land of the Picts, Steve Parker currently resides in Tokyo, Japan, where he runs a specialist coaching business for men and writes genre fiction. His published works include the novels Rebel Winter, Gunheads, Rynn’s World and Deathwatch, the novella Survivor, and several short stories featuring the Deathwatch kill-team Talon Squad, the Crimson Fists and various Astra Militarum regiments.

  An extract from Dark Imperium: Plague War.

  Weak light bobbed through pitchy black, casting a pale round that grew and shrank upon polished blue marble quarried on a world long ago laid waste. The hum of a grav motor sawed at the quiet of the abandoned hall, though not loudly enough to banish the peace of ages that lay upon it. The lamp was dim as candlelight, and greatly obscured by the iron lantern framing it. The angles of the servo-skull that bore the lantern further cut the glow, but even in the feeble luminance the stone gleamed with flecks of gold. The floor awoke for brief moments at its caress, glinting with a nebula’s richness, before the servo-skull moved on and the paving’s glory was lost to the dark again.

  The lonely figure of a man walked at the edge of the light, sometimes embraced by it completely, more often reduced to a collection of shadows and mellow highlights at its edge. The hood of his rough homespun robe was pulled over his head. Sandals woven of cord chased the light at a steady pace. The circle of light was small, but the echo of the man’s footsteps revealed the
space it traversed as vast. Less could be discerned about the man, were there anyone there to see him. He was a priest. Little else could be said besides that. It would certainly not be obvious to a casual observer he was militant-apostolic to the Lord Commander. He did not dress as men of his office ordinarily would, in brocade and jewels. He did not seem exalted. He certainly did not feel so. To himself, and to those poor souls he offered the succour of the Emperor’s blessing, he was simply Mathieu.

  Mathieu was a man of faith, and to him the Space Marines seemed faithless, ignorant of the true majesty of the Emperor’s divinity, but the Mortuis Ad Monumentum had the air of sanctity nevertheless.

  Mathieu liked it for that reason.

  Beyond the slap of the priest’s shoes and the whine of the skull, the silence in the Mortuis Ad Monumentum was so total, the sense of isolation so complete, that not even the background thrum of the giant engines pushing the Macragge’s Honour through the warp intruded. The rest of the ship vibrated, sometimes violently, sometimes softly, the growl of the systems always there. Not where the priest walked. The stillness of the ancient hall would not allow it. Within its confines time itself held its breath.

  Mathieu had spent his quieter days exploring the hall. Its most singular features were the statues thronging the margins. They were not just in ones or twos, effigies given space to be walked around and admired, nor were they ensconced in alcoves to decorate or commemorate. No, there were crowds of stone men, in places forty deep, all Adeptus Astartes in ancient marks of armour. It may be that they were placed with care once, but no longer, and further into the hall, the more jumbled their arrangements became. The hall had been breached in days gone by, and the statues destroyed. Untidy heaps of limbs were bulldozed carelessly aside and ugly patching marked wounds from ancient times.

  The warriors remembered by the statues had died ten thousand years before Mathieu’s birth. Perhaps they had even fallen in the Emperor’s wars to create the Imperium itself. Such an incredible length of years, hard to comprehend, and yet now the being who had led these self-same dead men commanded the ship again.

  It dizzied Mathieu that he served a son of the Emperor. He could not quite believe it, even after all that had happened, all that he had seen.

  Mathieu stopped in the dark where a group of statues huddled together. White stone glowed grey in the gloom. He had the terrifying notion that they had come alive and gathered to block his path, a phalanx of ghosts angered by profanity. He put aside the thought. He ignored the cold hand of fear creeping up his back. He had come off course, nothing more. It was easy enough to get lost in a hall half a mile wide and almost as long.

  His servo-skull bore a large HV upon its forehead. By the letter V alone he called it. He could not bring himself to refer to it by her name.

  ‘V,’ he said. His voice was pure and strong. It cut the shadows and frightened back the dark. Mathieu was an unimposing man, young, slight, but his voice was remarkable; a weapon greater than the worn laspistol he carried on his left hip, or the chainsword he bore into battle. Loud and commanding before his congregations, it seemed tiny in the face of the dead past, but like a silver bell chiming deep in winter-stilled woods, it was clear and bright and lovely.

  V emitted a flat, static-laced melody of acknowledgement.

  ‘Ascend five feet. Elevate lamp, pan left to right.’

  The skull’s motors pulsed. It rose up into the high voids of the monumentum. The light abandoned Mathieu, angling instead for the still figures surrounding him. Stone faces leapt from the dark, as if snatching the chance to be remembered, quickly drowning again in the black as V turned away. For a moment Mathieu’s fear came back. He did not recognise where he was, until V’s pale lamplight washed over a Space Marine captain of some unremembered era, the right arm held so proudly aloft broken off at the elbow. This warrior he recognised.

  Mathieu breathed in relief. ‘Descend to original height. Rotate lantern downwards to light my way. Proceed.’

  V voiced its fractured compliance. There were pretensions to musicality in the signal, but the limited vox-unit was fifth hand at least, scavenged like all V’s other fittings, and overuse had blunted its harmonies.

  ‘Proceed to the hermitage, quickly now. My time for this duty is running out.’

  V banked around and swept onwards. Mathieu picked up his pace to keep up.

  The Adeptus Astartes pretended to disdain worship. It was well known among the Adeptus Ministorum that they did not regard the Emperor as a god. Mathieu had known this all through his calling. The truth had proved to be not so simple. On the ship there were many shrines, decorated lovingly with images of death, and containing the bones of heroes in reliquaries that rivalled those of the most lauded saint in their ostentation. The Ultramarines’ cult was strong, though they did not worship. In chapels that denied religion their skull-masked priests protested loudly about the human nature of the Emperor and the primarchs while venerating them as gods in all but name. Their practice of honour, duty and obedience was conducted with a fanatical devotion.

  There was an element of wilful blindness to their practices, thought Mathieu.

  The way the Adeptus Astartes reacted to Roboute Guilliman bordered on awe. From the beginning Guilliman had warned Mathieu himself not to be worshipful, that he was not the son of a god. The priest had witnessed how irritated the primarch became with those who did not heed his words. And yet, these godless sons of his looked upon him, and they could barely hide their fervour.

  Mathieu did as he had been told. He affected to see the man Guilliman wished to be, but his familiarity with the primarch was largely an act. Mathieu did revere the primarch, sincerely and deeply.

  Previous militant-apostolics had carved themselves out a little realm in Guilliman’s palace spire atop the giant battleship. The position came with appropriately luxurious quarters. Some time before Mathieu’s tenure the largest room had been converted into a chapel of the Imperial Cult. It was gaudy, too concerned with expressions of wealth and influence and not faith. Mathieu had done his best to make it more austere. He removed some of the more vulgar fixtures, replaced statues of ancient cardinals with those of his favourite saints. There had been a sculpture of the Emperor in Glory standing proudly, sword in hand, upon the altar. Mathieu had replaced that with an effigy of the Emperor in Service; a grimacing corpse bound to the Golden Throne. Mathieu had always preferred that representation for it honoured the great sacrifice the Emperor made for His species. The Emperor’s service to mankind was so much more important than His aspects as a warrior, ruler, scientist or seer. Mathieu always tried to follow the example of the Emperor in Service, giving up what little comfort he had to aid the suffering mass of humanity.

  The chapel was tainted by the dishonesties of holy men. He preferred to lead worship with the ship’s bonded crew in their oily churches. He maintained the private chapel only because the display was expected of him. He rarely prayed there.

  For his private devotions he came down to this deserted cult monument of irreligious men.

  At the back of the hall was a small charnel house, where the stacked skulls of fallen heroes were cemented in grim patterns. The dust lay thick on all its decoration when Mathieu had discovered it. Nobody had been there for a long time.

  Beneath the eyeless stares of transhuman skulls, he had set up a plain wooden altar, this also bearing an effigy of the Emperor in Service. Arrayed around it were lesser statues of the nine loyal primarchs, as could be found in any holy place. That representing Roboute Guilliman was three times the size of the others. Mathieu genuflected to both Emperor and His Avenging Son, though the real Guilliman might well shoot him for doing so.

  He knelt awhile and prayed to the statues, the Emperor first, His sons and then finally to Guilliman. He stood and took from a large ammunition box thirty-six candles which he added to the racks of hundreds around the periphery of the room. When the c
andles were in place upon their spikes, he ignited a small promethium flame, and from it lit the wicks one by one, whispering solemnly over each.

  ‘Emperor watch over you,’ he said. ‘Emperor watch over you.’

  Each candle represented the wish for a prayer from a menial somewhere, those ordinary folk who made up the majority of the Imperial citizenry yet otherwise had no voice. When someone asked him for the blessing of light, Mathieu never refused, no matter how high or low, but promised to burn a candle for every request. There were so many pleas, so many in pain, even within the small world of a starship, that he could not possibly hope to keep his vow. In the end he had taken on aid, as his deacons insisted he should. Having always denied himself servants or servitors he was troubled by how easily he had got used to them. He never wanted to become like other high churchmen, with bloated households thousands strong, and feared this was but the first step on that road.

  When he found himself taking the servants for granted, he had taken penance, straining the capacity of his auto-flagellator to punish himself. After his scourging he had prepared this hermitage for himself, clearing it out with his bare hands, washing the floors, crafting the objects of worship. When he had done, he had reverently set up an identical rack of candles to show his sincerity, so now every lost soul had two candles to burn for them; one above lit by his servants, and one below lit by himself. His hermitage was dark when he arrived. He doused the candles when he left and he relit them every single time he went within, until they burned down to stumps. There were always more to replace them.

  ‘The Lord Guilliman chose me for my humility,’ he said to himself. With one unwavering hand he touched the promethium torch to every stick of wax. His other hand was clenched so tightly in his robes his knuckles glowed white in the candlelight. His auto-flagellator ran at a setting of mild agony. He let the pain thrill his body, purifying him of his selfish thoughts. ‘O Emperor, do not let me lose myself in this office. Do not let me damn myself by forgetting Your grace and Your purpose for me. Let me be free of pride. Let me be pure of purpose. Let me help Lord Guilliman to see the truth of Your light. Help me, O Master of Mankind.’